2007: a scorching new space odyssey

One of the most exciting British movies this year is Danny Boyle's sci-fi epic, Sunshine, which puts the divine back into a genre that had lost its way. To film-makers, it seems, the infinite has a spiritual attraction

At a key moment in Danny Boyle's radiant new sci-fi film Sunshine, a character is asked, 'Are you an angel?' With its retina-scorching visuals, which blaze from the screen into the dark abyss of the cinema auditorium, this extraordinary epic certainly seems to burn as brightly as a host of fiery angels. Set in 2057, Sunshine follows the crew of the spaceship Icarus II as they attempt to deliver a thermonuclear payload into the heart of the sun, lending new light to our galaxy's inexorably darkening star. En route, they pick up a distress signal from their lost predecessor, Icarus I, which disappeared into the void seven years earlier. Like an interstellar Marie Celeste, the first Icarus now hangs in space like a ghost ship, seemingly without a soul in sight. But as the reason for its mission failure is gradually revealed (more psychological than scientific), the crew of Icarus II fall prey to the eternal inner demons which haunt those who fly too close to the sun.

Shot not in Hollywood but in the 3 Mills studios in London's East End, Sunshine boasts extraordinary computer graphic imagery so luminescent you feel you could get sunburn just watching the film. As a sensory experience, it's overwhelming. But perhaps more importantly, Sunshine also harks back to a time when sci-fi turned its attention not toward the hallowed teen market but toward the heavens. Although screenwriter Alex Garland has said the inspiration for the film came from 'an article projecting the future of mankind from a physics-based, atheist perspective', this ambitious British fantasy increasingly blurs the boundaries between science and religion. In this respect, it falls within a grand tradition of adult-orientated science-fiction which is haunted by the question of divinity, whether as a presence or an absence.

These ideas are familiar to director Danny Boyle, who had a traditional religious upbringing, and planned to join a seminary at the age of 14. 'I was at school in Bolton,' he remembers, 'and all set to transfer to this seminary near Wigan. Then one of the priests told me that maybe I should wait, maybe I should stay and finish my school education. Quite soon after that, I saw A Clockwork Orange, which was the first film I went to see by myself. And it just changed everything. I know it all sounds too neat, but that's what happened.'

Boyle went on to make Trainspotting, which has been dubbed 'the Clockwork Orange of the Nineties' - a viscerally hip portrait of anarchic youth culture which became both a controversial modern film classic and a defining pop icon. Yet despite his current free-form agnosticism, Boyle's films have continued to be haunted by the detritus of his religious background, from the worldly angels of the romantic fantasy A Life Less Ordinary (which owes a debt to Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death aka Stairway to Heaven) to the solidly earthy apparitions of saints who appear to the young hero of the underrated Millions. Other Boyle hits include 28 Days Later, a Garland-scripted zombie shocker set in a terrifying post-apocalyptic Britain. Now, with Sunshine, Boyle has set his sights higher than ever before, making a film which addresses 'what happens to your mind when you meet the creator of all things in the universe'.

Sci-fi fans will see a range of familiar texts echoed in the broadstrokes outline of Sunshine, most notably Paul WS Anderson's Event Horizon, a flawed but fascinating Nineties Brit-pic in which a lost spaceship re-emerges from a black hole having been to hell and back - literally. There are also nods to John Carpenter's Seventies cult classic Dark Star, in which co-creator Dan O'Bannon plays Sgt Pinback, whose oddball moniker inspired Sunshine's most mysterious character, Pinbacker. O'Bannon went on to co-write Alien, Ridley Scott's deep space shocker to which so much modern sci-fi owes a debt, and with which Sunshine shares its use of the time-honoured 'intercepted distress signal' motif. And then of course there's my own personal favourite, the underrated sci-fi masterpiece Silent Running - Doug Trumbull's eco-warning dystopian fantasy in which the last of Earth's forests are consigned to giant geodesic domes in space, an idea that appears to have blossomed into the 'oxygen gardens' aboard the Icarus spaceship in Boyle's 21st-century adventure.

Yet the primary heavenly body around which Sunshine charts its orbit is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a weighty and portentous work which opens with 'The Dawn of Man' and climaxes with the birth of a Star Child in what appears to be an extraterrestrial rewriting of the creationist myth. Just as God creates Adam in his own image in Genesis, so the 'aliens' of 2001 transform a dying astronaut into a perfectly formed space baby, the first of a new species which will return to earth (presumably) to herald the next age in man's cosmic evolution.

This conclusion may be obliquely expressed (I remember thinking 'what was all that about?' and having to read the novel to find out) but the mesmerising symphony of sound and vision which constitutes the film's final act clearly suggest a metaphysical encounter way beyond the realms of rational explanation. Dubbed 'the ultimate trip', Kubrick's psychedelic movie used music by the avant garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti, which Underworld's Karl Hyde admits profoundly influenced his own work on the music for Boyle's new film. 'I'd never heard anything like it,' says Hyde of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, which sounds for all the world like choirs of alien angels ringing throughout the heavens, investing 2001's baffling denouement with undeniable overtones of religious ecstasy and unearthly transcendence.

There's a strikingly similar blend of science and theology in Sunshine, in which whizz-kid physicist Capa (played by the ethereally blue-eyed Cillian Murphy) comes face to face with his maker in the shape of a dying sun. Just as the enigmatic monoliths from 2001 act as creative gods to the earthlings, so the sun serves as both the giver of life and the source of all knowledge in Boyle's soul-searching movie.

'I tried to keep it visual,' says Boyle, 'because some of the ideas in the film are very hard to talk about. But when we were making Sunshine, which involved a lot of post-production special effects, my responsibility to the actors was to describe to them what they would be seeing. I was brought up in a religious environment, and so my natural tendency was to lapse into descriptions which were broadly creationist. I'd be saying things like: "Kneel before the source of all creation, bow down before the source of all life!" And even Alex [Garland], who is quite an aggressive atheist, has that same cultural instinct in the language that he uses.'

So too, it appears, does Sunshine's scientific consultant Dr Brian Cox, who works at Cern (the Centre for European Nuclear Research), the world's largest particle-physics laboratory. According to Boyle, Cox's work includes the pursuit of the 'Higgs boson', the missing piece in the current theory of the fundamental nature of matter which is affectionately known amongst scientists as the 'God particle'. 'Brian Cox admits that you can't really speak about these things without allowing for what some people would call a "spiritual dimension",' says Boyle. 'The question is, of course, whether that spiritual dimension is just a constraint of the language - the fact that we simply have no other vocabulary to describe such things. I think that's what Alex believes. But for me, what Capa sees at the end of the movie is definitely something beyond the rational.'

The other significant star in Sunshine's cinematic galaxy is Tarkovsky's Solaris, a sombre Russian classic which, like 2001, uses a journey into deep space to dramatise a symbolic voyage into the very soul of man. Tarkovsky and Kubrick were aware of each other's work, and their joint efforts represent the twin peaks of a neo-spiritualist brand of science-fiction cinema which reached its apotheosis in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Other contemporaneous works (which flourished in the period before Star Wars turned sci-fi into an amusement park ride) include John Boorman's bonkers Zardoz, a self-important romp with philosophical pretensions. Here, Sean Connery (in leather straps, boots, and fetching posing pouch) can be found climbing inside the mouth of the flying deity Zardoz which rules the wastelands of the earth in a godforsaken near-future. Zardoz is meant to be a marauding, all-powerful divinity but, as Connery's Zed discovers, he is nothing more than a false idol - a smoke-and-mirrors illusion like the Wizard of Oz ('Zard-Oz', geddit?). The movie was pretentious, boring, and very, very silly. But its adults-only X-rating and esoteric script spoke volumes about the grown-up aura that sci-fi had attained in the wake of 2001 and Solaris

Nor were the theosophical tendencies of the genre utterly quelled by the kidtastic assault of George Lucas and his clones. Although Star Wars and its spin-off sequels and prequels played primarily to a congregation of children and arrested adolescents, the endless ooga-booga about 'The Force' and 'The Dark Side' have since flourished into something resembling a modern religion which commands an army of merchandise-hungry disciples. I can't stand the Star Wars movies, which always seemed to me to represent a gross infantalisation of the dark hearted 'serious' sci-fi (Quatermass and the Pit, Silent Running, Soylent Green) on which I was raised. But I've heard pulpit preachers quote Yoda in their attempts to engage young people with religion, the battle between Good and Evil having been played out in the popular imagination as a war between Sith Lords and Jedi Knights.

Even Captain Kirk has dabbled in the search for God, most egregiously in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier in which the Enterprise boldly goes 'through the barrier' between this world and the next. One sub-2001 light show later, and Kirk is splitting infinitives in heaven. Of course, it all turns out to be a Zardoz-style con, but not before everyone has had a chance to pontificate at great length about the meaning of paradise and the nature of the divine being. (The film was directed by William Shatner himself, which perhaps explains why God turns out to be no match for Captain Kirk.)

Danny Boyle sensibly prefers Robert Zemeckis's 1997 film Contact, large swathes of which involve heated debate about whether a priest, a psychoanalyst or a particle physicist would be best placed to represent mankind in our first meeting with extraterrestrial life-forms. 'I was there on opening night,' says Boyle, a devoted sci-fi fan with an enthusiasm for the genre in all its forms. He was even slated to direct the third Alien sequel but backed out due to anxieties about the level of special effects and the studio's evident desire for a nuts-and-bolts, action-orientated romp.

Having completed Sunshine, however, this endlessly energetic filmmaker has no plans to revisit sci-fi, which has a habit of producing creative burn-out. 'There's a reason why many directors only make one science-fiction film,' he says.

'It's because you exhaust yourself... spiritually. I do think that I've become more spiritual working on this - you have to be open-minded. The interesting thing is that the more commercial sci-fi films, like Event Horizon or Alien, tend to go for Hell in space. But maybe its more ambitious to aim for Heaven...'

Five-star sci-fi

2001: A Space Odyssey

(Stanley Kubrick, 1968) Arthur C Clarke's short story 'The Sentinel' provided the inspiration for Kubrick's work in which enigmatic alien monoliths play God, leading mankind on a voyage of discovery - 'beyond infinite'!

Solaris

(Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972) Art-house fans howled in 2002 when US director Steven Soderbergh launched his remake of this revered Russian classic, which many consider a poetic riposte to the cold 'inhumanity' of 2001.

Dark Star

(John Carpenter, 1974) Astronauts amble through space with a talking bomb with delusions of its own deity in this low budget cult classic. 'In the beginning, there was the darkness ... and there was also me. Let there be light...'

Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980) Apocalyptic religious imagery abounds as William Hurt's drug-addled Harvard Scientist journeys into inner space in search of 'that true self, that original self, that first self ... tangible and incarnate. And I'm gonna find the fucker!'

Event Horizon

(Paul WS Anderson, 1997) Space travel turns into a journey to hell. 'I created the Event Horizon to reach the stars!' burbles Sam Neill's astro-boffin. 'But she's gone much further than that - to a dimension of pure chaos, pure evil!'